Dear Visitors: Please note the Park(ing) Day NYC website will be under construction for the coming fall and winter months. Please revisit the site in April 2011.

To learn more about Park(ing) Day NYC or Transportation Alternatives, or to ask questions about the event, please email: info@parkingdaynyc.org.

See you in 2011! The Park(ing) Day NYC Team

Hi Park(ing) Day Enthusiasts,

I’m Alyssa, the Park(ing) Day NYC Fellow. What’s a Park(ing) Day NYC Fellow you ask? I’m here to help plan, coordinate and promote Park(ing) Day NYC. I’m also here to answer any questions you may have about Park(ing) Day and how to go about creating your own Park(ing) Spot this September. You can always reach me at alyssa@transalt.org.

And I’d like to share with you a bit about why I became involved in Park(ing) Day NYC and how I envision the streets of New York can be transformed for our communities.

———-

When I think of all the possible uses for 120 sq feet of public space on my block, my mind fills with ideas. I begin to imagine the lush community garden that could flourish there with ripe tomatoes and the sweet smell of basil. Or I think of having a miniature version of Socrates Sculpture Park right outside my front door, with gorgeous artwork that softens the harsh concrete landscape all around. Or a smaller version of the Highline with oversized lawn chairs to relax in, chatting with my neighbors after work. Or maybe the kids down the street who are always bursting the hydrant open for a refreshing dip in the hot Brooklyn summer could have a small wading pool to play in.

But everyday there is a only a car sitting there, only moving on street cleaning days and then returning a few hours later. That same space could become parking for something else like the bicycles that jut out on all sides from the posts near the subway station. One parking spot can park at least 10-15 bicycles. One parking spot could allow children to play safely. One parking spot could showcase local art. One parking spot could grow enough food for a family. One parking spot could enrich the lives of an entire community. 8’ by 15’ is a lot of public space in New York City, what will you create in a Park(ing) spot?

- Alyssa

Park(ing) Day NYC Fellow and Bushwick, Brooklyn Resident

Organizers, designers and street-reclaimers: you are amazing! Thank you once again for converting boring parking spots into vibrant public spaces and for making Park(ing) Day NYC a tremendous success for the third year in a row. Fifty-one park(ing) spots lined city streets throughout the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan, inviting passers-by in to make a wish on a wishing tree, lie on pillows in Peace Park and envision how public spaces could be better allocated to people, not cars.

Park(ing) Day NYC will happen again in 2010! Check the Park(ing) Day NYC website in May for announcements about the September event and for information on how to register and plan your space. In the meantime, if you want to brainstorm ideas for a 2010 park(ing) space, check out the How-To section on the website and the Homepage for hundreds of images and a StreetsFilm video.

While the official (Park)ing Day NYC event does not occur in  the winter, street reclamation still can! To stay up to date on Transportation Alternatives events and actions, sign-up for the StreetBeat.

See you in 2010!

Wondering if there is a space in NYC where you can build Lego models, watch live painting and performance art, and sit and relax beneath the Highline? This space can exist, and did for one day - Park(ing) Day – thanks to No Longer Empty, an arts organization utilizing non-traditional places for presenting visual and performance art.

Check out the video documenting their day engaging passers-by of all ages and turning a boring parking spot into a lively interactive art space -

I woke up last Saturday morning to the sound of helicopters buzzing around my neighborhood like mosquitoes. Loud, nagging, the sound seeped into the inner sleep and forced me up. I had to be up anyways, I work for Transportation Alternatives and the day was the first of Summer Streets – when a portion of Park Avenue is transformed into a car-free panacea.

I quickly got dressed, up, and out. Turning the corner of Ralph and Patchen I realized that the reason the helicopters were buzzing was located on my block. On my street. In my hood. Cruising down my block I was thwarted in multiple directions because there was police activity.

I mention this halted commute because it is the opposite of what we are trying to accomplish here. Later in the day I was surrounded by everyone from Senator Chuck Schumer cruising by on his bike, to Jeannette Sadik-Khan, the DOT Commissioner that leads the Summer Streets effort, also on her bike, to a family of home school upper west siders, bikers, segway riders, pedestrians of leisure, and running groups all whom came out en masse.

Our streets are not always livable. They are not always the free passage ways we want them to be. We are not always safe. Sometimes, however, we are. And on a day like last weekend when I got to see that there was a sharp line between me and where I wanted to go, looking at an empty street cut off from tape and the scouring of police officers looking for a criminal who shot a cop and the other side, a empty street protected by police officers keeping all who driver motorized vehicles out.

There is a difference. The difference is in the details.

Summer Streets had dance classes, and water hook ups, and places to sit. T.A. put up a makeshift park a’la Park(ing) Day, using a giant loom weaved into a place to cover asphalt. The idea was simple. What if we reimagined our public space, our parking spaces, into places that we can actually live and be at?

I was held back from advancing in the morning but my bike was my friend. I wheeled around a few blocks and found and opening in the chaos. It seems that for one day – and now 3 in the calendar year – a sea of alternatives to cars can now needle their way through the chaos one empty road at a time.

-ibrahim abdul-matin

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about Park(ing) Day in the context of one of my favorite art works/public space interventions, Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates. In the early 1970s Matta-Clark bought up a number of parcels of land being auctioned off by the City.  These small and awkwardly shaped pre-development plots were animated simply through Matta-Clark’s taking an interest in them.  His purchase of the land transformed the so-called remnant “gutterscapes” into new artzones with unlimited potential energy.  Though Matta-Clark died before he was able to actualize his vision for Fake Estates, the project raises all sorts of questions about types of space in the City and what they can (or should) be, and about the very notion of land ownership.

While Park(ing) Day is more in the spirit of sharing than owning, I think the ambition is parallel.  Just as Gordon Matta-Clark challenged New York’s patterns of (over)development by becoming an NYC land owner, there’s something slightly transgressive about parking yourself in a parking spot for an afternoon.  It implicitly questions the supremacy of the car and the time, space and money forked over to perpetuate that supremacy. 

Last year at the Center for Architecture we collaborated with Common Room, one of our 2008 New Practices winners, to create a satellite meeting/public interface space.  Passers-by were encouraged to engage firm members and the day ended up as a free-and-easy dialogue about the built environment.

By Jonah Stern

Every few days or so I sit on the corner of Fulton and South Portland with a man who sells coconut water and juices, a Nigerian clothing designer who always dresses in his best wares, a slick personal shopper, an elder mystic who smokes cloves, and a few other quality gentlemen who have their eye on livable streets. We discuss politics, religion, and the weather, anything that strikes our fancy. One must come prepared, your arguments will be sliced and diced, no malice, but one must come prepared – this is what we love to do on our street.

Every member of our group has a chair. The chairs are locked against the Lafayette Ave. C train stop and kept there by the gentleman biker who struts around with an English accent, spectacles, and the tight curls of a Caribbean born, English bred, and American made black man.  The assortment is a who’s who of what it means to be a NY’er – international, well-read, interesting, they may be millionaires or homeless, - no one knows, on the street level it only matters that they are unafraid of redefining space and making a little oasis out of a small strip of concrete.

This is what Park(ing) Day is about to me: looking at what you do on your streets; playing, dancing, talking, unching, people watching, and taking that idea into the physical – making those activities accessible for everyone. Redefining streets.

Some of the things we talk about will fade into history, others, recall our early days as youth struggling to stay cool in the muggy heat of the street and doing our best.

My good buddy Tyler Askew, the multi-talented designer and art director living in NYC said when asked about what makes a public space healthy and safe, “trees, vegetation, ample sidewalk space, and lighting at night.”

Ranjit Bhagwat at the Clinical Psychology Program at Rutgers University where he is pursuing a PhD, says he loves it when he has “a corner store and a decent bar and a small park.”

We are listening. The city is listening. Designers, artists, architects, small vendors, bikers, pedestrians alike are crowing over their small spaces of concrete, are all listening. If you are stuck for ideas, I encourage you to make your way to your favorite corner, after work, and sit, talk, and mingle with a few like minded and challenging friends. For ideas for your Park on Park(ing) Day do a local audit, a scan, and review, see what the vision is for your community – and determine what ways you can personally help to manifest a slice of that vision for all of us to share.

We do it everyday on Fulton and South Portland.

Ibrahim Abdul-Matin

Peering past the protective barriers rimming our 3 spaces-long Seventh Haven Park on the west side of 7^th Avenue between 24^th and 25^th in Manhattan on September 19^th, we were the power of demonstration.

At Seventh Haven, neighbors, friends, shopkeepers, grocery store employees, and students became park designer/planners for the day. The street’s generosity was lent for the project, too, demonstrating how malleable it is when the spirit of its engineers prioritize people over automobile speed. Motorists and passersby were wooed by our street possibilities transformation, and inquired with amusement or amazement throughout the day, or else just joined us, choosing to embody the power of demonstration on their own.

Sure Park(ing) Day is whimsical, small scale, and impermanent, but it is also a forceful reappropriation, and for this, people love it; it is empowering!

The need for more green, people-scaled places in which to linger works its way into park(ers) lungs, ears, voices on Park(ing) Day; there’s nothing like high-speed traffic whizzing past an unprotected park(ing) space to underscore traffic’s incompatibility with rich social spaces. But lucky park(ers)! We enjoy the thrill of urban life lived ahead of the curve, nudging the automobile to slow down or stay off the road entirely, by together absorbing the risks of our preferred street vision in the making. And with such a demonstration, we invite neighbors and strangers to do likewise, and imagine post-automobile possibilities!

What could be more powerful?

#3—Design Constraints, part deux

Probably no one needs convincing about the design constraints involved in remaking a streetside parking space into a Park(ing) place. But to highlight a few:
• Impossibly small size, especially in comparison with the remaining road space;
• Asphalt as hot as the late summer sun beating down on its heat-absorbing surface;
• Automobile traffic whizzes or crawls, exhaust-spewing, at uncomfortable proximity.

But consider how these constraints become opportunities:
• Small spaces can be filled with BIG things; a park is socially expansive—it attracts people who might then sit and do a crossword puzzle, eat lunch, or meet their neighbors and make plans to attend the next community board meeting together to advocate for more permanent parks!
• How many ways can one make shade on an asphalt island? Umbrellas? Market tents? Ficus trees borrowed from a sidewalk-fronting Italian restaurant? Rusted out, removed car doors sticking out of planter boxes, as clipped wings from a DeLorean? The possibilities can make as big a statement as the space is small…
• As a stationary space for people, your park sits in stark contrast to the pace and purpose of automobile traffic it abuts on one side and the sidewalk movement passing it on the other. Work this “gap” to remind motorists of their impact on your park (isolation masks? Over-sized traffic barriers?) and to simultaneously woo pedestrians in (isolation mask decorating? Live music? Gymnastic equipment? Cold drinks? A bench on which to enjoy their lunch where the previous day there wasn’t any?)

Point is, Park(ing) Day is about possibility. It’s about making a lot out of a little—whether motorist education or pedestrian refuge offering. Think about your park(ing) space and how its smallness and ill-suitedness might become its most valuable assets for demonstrating to both speeding and plodding passersby the higher uses to which a park(ing) space might be dedicated…